Fraudsters con two elderly women in Nago

Two cases of a tax scam targeting elderly women occurred successively in Nago on May 18 and 20.

According to Nago Police, in both cases the victims first received letters purportedly from the local tax office with instructions on how to transfer money into an assigned bank account. Then the fraudster contacted the victims by phone to confirm that they indeed had received the letters, and convinced them to make the deposit at a certain time and bank.

In the first case, the woman in her 80’s deposited a total of ¥1,000,000 in two installments, and in the second, another woman in her 70’s was conned out of ¥800,000.

Nago Police say that tax payments to official institutions must not be paid via an ATM, and stress that elderly people should be wary of scams and not to deal with any suspicious phone calls alone.